Robin Rendle
Robin Rendle
Robin Rendle
I’m Robin, a British designer, writer, and typographic nuisance from San Francisco. Today I’m a designer at Apple although previously I’ve made software at Retool, Sentry, and Gusto as well as for clients like Buttondown and XOXO.
Latest Posts
John McPhee on writer’s block: You are writing, say, about a grizzly bear. No words are forthcoming. For six, seven, ten hours no words have been forthcoming. You are blocked, frustrated, in despair. You are nowhere, and that’s where...
Rutherford Craze breaks down the last two years of Mass-Driver, the type foundry he started back in 2020: When I started Mass-Driver, I wasn’t certain whether the studio would still be around in 2022. I was hopeful, perhaps even...
Today we saw the Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museum in London. They are beautiful; 6000 year old marble panels which tell a comic book story of a Greek mythological war between Centaurs and Lapiths, with the gods watching from...
No matter how fancy your Figma file is or how beautiful and lovingly well organized that Storybook documentation is; the front-end is always your source of truth. You can hate it as much as you like—all those weird buttons, variables,...
Was it three years or four? It feels like a decade since I was last here. But today, here I am. Here we are. The UK. We are sniffly and dry and exhausted. Neither of us slept on the plane and I made the mistake of watching Dead Poet’s...
After reading James’ rant about dictionaries yesterday it was clear that Webster’s is the best of the lot; poetic, romantic, playful. It’s more than a dictionary, really. But after looking for an old copy I just couldn’t find a half...
Back in ye olde 2014, James Somers wrote about dictionaries and his particular fancy for Webster’s. However! James argues that dictionaries are not tools for showing you what words mean, but instead can be used as prompts for better...
“So I sat there,” he said. “And I thought to myself, ya know, ‘ruthless honesty’ and all that. This guy sold me a terrible sandwich and I’m going to tell him just how terrible it was. But then he was upset when I told him! He made this...
Last week I was promoted to Senior Product Designer and so I should feel safe in the knowledge that, yes, I am doing good work. I am on track. Success. Next. But I can’t celebrate just yet because all I see are my flaws; the half-baked...
Tell the stars I’m coming, Make them leave a space for me.
When it comes to drawing a design system in Figma or Sketch or what have you, there’s a question we have to ask ourselves all the time: what should we document? And what should we leave out? So we want to have our icons and colors in...
A clock arrived one day at our door. A special clock. But the mechanism inside had failed in some way. We checked the batteries, examined the little gears, everything looked fine. But no tick, no tock. The clock was busted. After ten...
My goodness, what a website this is: All 2,242 illustrations from James Sowerby’s compendium of knowledge about mineralogy in Great Britain and beyond, drawn 1802–1817 and arranged by color. I’m unfamiliar with Nicholas Rougeaux’s work...
The light is perfect today; the sky a glacial blue, the sun setting off to the left. On the hill just over there, layers upon layers of houses like a great slanting and disorganized cake. I watch them everyday. When I wake up they’re...
Monica Byrne made an anti-resume way back in 2013—it’s a spreadsheet that lists all her publishing failures and puts her success into context. This is a cool and punk-rock idea! It reminds me of Kat Huang’s Failure Resume that I spotted...